Naked Souls

21, November 2004

Dakota Community Church

Naked Souls

Introduction:

Have you ever felt there is a distance between you and the Lord?

Has the enemy convinced you that God is tired of forgiving you?

Do you ever wrestle with feelings of unworthiness before the Lord?

Tonight I want to look at what the Bible says about how Jesus knows us and how he responds to that knowledge.

1. How well does God know us?

Of course we know He does know every good thing we do because we tell Him about it immediately.

What about the bad things?

What about the things we are ashamed of?

Do we really ever stop to think what it means to serve an all knowing God or do we just give the idea lip service?

Have you stopped to consider that God knows?

- Everything we do.

Proverbs 15: 3

3 The eyes of the LORD are everywhere, keeping watch on the wicked and the good.

Matthew 6:6

6But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Psalm 69: 5

5 You know my folly, O God; my guilt is not hidden from you.

He knows everything we do in fact on a deeper level than most of us would like to imagine.

Consider this:

1Corinthians 6: 12-20

12"Everything is permissible for me"--but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible for me"--but I will not be mastered by anything. 13"Food for the stomach and the stomach for food"--but God will destroy them both. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also. 15Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! 16Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, "The two will become one flesh." 17But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit.

18Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. 19Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.

He is in you and involved in everything you do.

From “Speaking My Mind” by Tony Campolo, page 109:

“I do not want to leave this discussion of what goes on with Christ suffering and cleansing us from our sin in His eternal now without pointing out that all of this should provide a great impetus for living the holy life. Every time I sin, at that very instant Jesus groans at Calvary. Even as I sin today, He experiences the agony of ingesting my sin into Himself in His eternal now, as He hangs spread eagle on the tree back there and then. This is why it says in Hebrews 6: 6 that when we sin, we crucify Him right now.

While spending a few days as the religious-emphasis-week speaker on the campus of a Christian college, I talked with a senior who was quite cavalier about the sins in his life. He told me about having an affair with a married woman. Then he said, “Whenever I commit sin, I remember that Jesus took the punishment for that sin back there on the cross.”

In response, I said, “The next time you’re in bed having sex with your lover, I hope you can hear the screams of Jesus from the cross; because at that very moment Jesus is reaching across time and absorbing into His own body the very sin that you are committing there and then. The Jesus who hates sin becomes the sinner that you are. The innocent Jesus becomes the adulterer you are, because in His eternal now, He becomes everything about you that He hates.”

- Everything we think.

Psalm 94: 11

11 The LORD knows the thoughts of man; he knows that they are futile.

Luke 9: 46-48

An argument started among the disciples as to which of them would be the greatest. 47Jesus, knowing their thoughts, took a little child and had him stand beside him. 48Then he said to them, "Whoever welcomes this little child in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. For he who is least among you all--he is the greatest."